The Berlinale announced a long-term partnership with MoMA last Tuesday for the popular "Retrospective" film series. Each year, the program features a single director or thematic focus that holds a special significance to film’s history. The 2012 edition, “The Red Dream Factory. Mezhrabpom-Film and Prometheus 1921 – 1936,” examines the famed Mezhrapbom-Film and Prometheus film studios, a politically avant-garde group of directors working in Moscow in the 1920s and Berlin in 1930s.
Established in 1922 by Moisei Aleinikov, a Russian producer, and Willi Münzenberg, a progenitor of “red media” in Germany, the studios produce over 600 films in their circa 15-year existence. The pair envisioned a kind of cinema that championed socialist values while confronting the precipitous rise of totalitarianism in Russia and Germany at that time. This innovative form of ‘realism’ quickly drew anger from Hitler and Stalin, who saw film’s only purpose to be that of supporting the regime. In 1933, Hitler brutally destroyed the Prometheus studio; Stalin followed suit three years later, quashing Mezhrapbom.
Popularly known as the Red Dream Factory, Mezhrabpom churned out classics such as Vsevolod Pudovkin’s "Potomok Genghis-Khana" ("Storm over Asia," 1928), Boris Barnet’s "Devushka s korobkoy" ("The Girl With the Hat," 1927), and Margarita Barskaya's drama “Torn Shoes,” which looked at German youth at the time of Hitler’s rise to power.
More than just socially acute, the studio led the way in technological progress within film. Mezhrabpom produced the Soviet Union’s first sound film, Nikolai Ekk’s "Putyovka v zhizn" ("Road to Life," 1931), as well as its earliest animated features. According to Rainer Rother, who heads "Retrospective" and is the director of the Deutsche Kinemathek, Mezhrabpom and Prometheus, “inspired the entire European film avant-garde.”
After the Berlinale, the Mezhrabpom portion of the series will travel to the MoMA, opening in April. The two have also committed to working closely for future "Retrospective" series, collaborating on both the curation and execution. MoMA senior film curator Laurence Kardish, who will head up the collaboration, told ARTINFO that, “the contributions Kuleshov and his pupils, most especially Pudovkin, made in the art of film editing is inestimable. Hollywood knew of these films and admired them and when MoMA began collecting films in the early '30s, the first film curator in the world, MoMA's Iris Barry went to Moscow and brought back films by Kuleshov, Pudovkin, and Eisenstein among others.”
Kardish also indicates that there is much more to be found from the cinema of the Weimar period. “I believe only about half of the films made during this period have surfaced, and the hope is that more will emerge, not only in Germany but in collections around the world and particularly in Russia,” he said.
MoMA showed a series of Prometheus films in last year’s “Daydreams and Nightmares: Weimar Cinema, 1919 -1933,” organized in conjunction with the Deutsche Kinemathek.